Oddbean new post about login | logout Topics are not hashtags or communities. Communities can veer off topic. Hashtags require user input. Topics are collections of notes that fall under the same umbrella. For example, a topic of Nostr could contain: nostr, fiatjaf, nips, nsec, npub, nostr address, relays, developer update notes etc... Topics are passive, and do not require user tagging - which is the issue with hashtags. Communities require "joining" - something people may not be willing to do just to look up a topic. Topics also help understand what's happening around the world - essentially turning clients into places to get your news. This is one of X's biggest selling points (news).
ok ok I get it! 😉
Some people don’t
That's ok. Some people think ETF inflows are exciting too.
I like this. Let’s run it further. I’ve been on Primal and a few other twitter-esque, nostr-based clients for a few weeks now and want to better find content tied to my varied interests but I can’t seem to. Topics hide in the nuance of posts, in both the text and image content. Where tagging may not be the answer it could have helped me find my content, or maybe we’re all early enough that it’s just not there yet. Or, strong search could have helped. Maybe, there’s to be a client search engine for nostr based content? How can we find what we want in the real world on a digital platform when it’s fed with a nostr distributed data network. I want local things, sports things, cigar things, bitcoin things (we have this one covered), cool pictures, real estate stuff, investing stuff. Is Primal just instead of Twitter or am putting to much pressure on it to have it try to replace Reddit too? I’m with you though. I want tags to be unnecessary because the function is covered by another feature, or very automated and intuitive, and deployed to help us find what we want or reach who we post for.
Huh for once I'm advocating for the use of LLMs lol. Anyway, you could have an LLM go through notes and try to sort them by topic. It seems notes and topics have a many-to-many relationship. And you could have people maybe comment on a given note-topic relationship to explain how they accurate they feel it is? Or maybe, topics are things different users create that they can share with others. Each user can assign a note they feel belongs to a given topic and then when you search by topic, you get user submitted groupings of notes? Then another user could copy that grouping of notes, change the topic name if they like, add/remove notes to the grouping and then publish it again? Idk I'm just spit balling
Shareable filters of the global feed. Take a bunch of user defined params (user accounts, keywords, hashtags, media types, date etc) and allow the user to filter out the noise of global to hone in on specific topics. These topics can be shared/followed/saved and modified etc between users. Its transparent and not algo based. I think it gives power to the user to decide. Of course some will create and some will just use the filtered topic. That's OK too. nostr:nevent1qqsrxlsjx64syu9nrtw58hwrjc3lkuxeqyhpvge4hlnxs54tmjmpg0gpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtczyp99u5ll8dudt0dc3fd4afgks8d4ane44faddlpt7x3pmrjujcu3kqcyqqqqqqgetlpss